


Give Your All to Me

by Anya (aCrowdOfStars)



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst?, F/M, Fem!John - Freeform, Female John Watson, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff and Angst, Genderswap, Kink Meme, M/M, Semi-Public Sex, Wall Sex, just a little, sex in ugly city gardens, unprotected sex
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-06
Updated: 2014-11-01
Packaged: 2018-02-20 02:51:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,398
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2412257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aCrowdOfStars/pseuds/Anya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a badly decorated garden on George St, Sherlock's hips dug into Joan's and it simply could not be ignored anymore. And that was just their first mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Kink meme prompt that resulted in something that barely, if at all, filled the prompt. Not beta'd, not Brit picked, not written while sober, so all mistakes are the fault of Rex Goliath Pinot Grigio. I'm completely innocent, I swear.
> 
> Edit: Apparently, I had more to write on this one. Alright! I don't think this will be very long, and I will update as often as I can!

Mr. Chatterjee had finally admitted to his marriage, much to the satisfaction of Sherlock and the chagrin of Mrs. Hudson, who had let the entirety of Baker Street be aware of the depth and breadth of her displeasure. Very shortly, she announced, with as much pomp as a royal parade, that she was removing herself to her sister's for a month. Joan had tried to talk her down for quite some time, but to no avail; to Surrey Mrs. Hudson went, leaving 221B in the somewhat capable hands of its tenants until she had climbed down from the Mountain of Dating Induced Bitterness.

Mrs. Turner predicted absolutely mayhem within forty-eight hours. Mr. Turner ruffled the paper and grumbled something unsavory regarding their own tenants, earning a heated glare from Mrs. Turner before she turned back to the windows to eye Baker Street carefully. Everything seemed completely, absolutely normal.

She didn't trust a moment of it.

Which was absolutely respectable, if slightly off target.

A few streets down, Sherlock deftly hopped the bush-covered fence to someone's garden, leaving Joan to clamber over rather ungracefully. Her heels, which had started the night as gorgeous satin only to now be stained and torn, caught in the metal fencing. Sherlock moved forward to pull her free, arms under hers to tug her further into the rather gaudy collection of plants around them. She had just struggled free when the distinctively steel-toed steps of their pursuer rang close.

As he drew closer to their hidden garden, his footsteps slowed to only the occasional clip of steel on the concrete of George Street. Sherlock successfully tugged Joan back, hissing in her ear for _absolute silence_ as he used the arm around her waist to pull her tight against him, hidden in the overhang of a rather unpleasant vine. 

“Really?” she hissed, the word barely more than an exhale, though Sherlock wrinkled his nose as he jerked his grip as if she had screamed. “Really?” she repeated, slightly angrier, wrapping her hands around his wrist where it held her just below her neck. It had been a perfectly wonderful date. He, a visiting American doing research for a book he was writing, had appeared to be terribly put out when Sherlock appeared to tug her out of the small cafe where they had met for drinks. Judging from the narrowed view he’d given Sherlock, she sincerely doubted that she would receive a response to her hastily composed “I’m so sorry” text message.

Though, honestly, it probably didn’t help that the text wasn’t _actually_ hastily composed, but one she had saved in her drafts section to send to whomever Sherlock had chosen to offend. Her apologies had already become rather repetitive, and it saved her typing time.

The sheer absurdity of having such a message saved was what caused her to tug now at Sherlock’s wrist even as he pulled her flush against him, further into the tacky decorations. “You can’t just do this,” Joan whispered. “Every time I have a halfway decent date, you’ve got a lead. It’s getting a bit ridiculous.”

“Do you want to know what’s ridiculous?” Sherlock leant forward to put his mouth as close to her ear as it could go. “That we’re trying very hard not to get killed, and you want to discuss your love life.” His breath brushed hot against the curve of her ear while thick black curls brushed against her neck. Her date had had carefully coiffed blonde hair tucked into a neat fauxhawk. It was nothing like the haphazard and neglected curls of her flatmate, and she shivered to feel them fall against the bare patches of her neck, hoping Sherlock simply thought she was cold. 

“Lack of.” Joan shifted while she spat her response, hoping to remove her foot from the squelching mud pat she’d stepped in, only to find she had bent slightly at some point, no doubt to unconsciously to accommodate his higher placed, sharp edged hipbones. Regardless of the reason, she was suddenly, harshly aware of the position of her hips against his, slotted perfectly in just the way she had hoped that the English professor she’d ditched tonight, or the museum curator she’d ditched a week ago, or even the barista she’d half-heartedly flirted with last month would have fit. 

It had been a bit since someone had pressed their hips into hers, she had to admit.

Alright, more than a bit.

_Four months, two weeks, three days_ , whispered a voice just in the back of her head, sounding terribly just like Sherlock’s hushed voice at the curve of ear, and she shifted again out of frustration, realizing quite belatedly that it managed to tuck her even further into Sherlock’s curved form. The low hiss behind her let her know that Sherlock had recognized, realized, and appreciated, however reluctantly, this new position. 

This was exactly what she had been trying to avoid. This overly intimate press of Sherlock’s anatomy to hers was pushing at all the carefully constructed barriers she had built. It was so much easier to handle Sherlock traipsing through the apartment in a sheet and a smirk when she had carefully folded, tucked, patted her feelings into a cardboard box, kept in the furthest part of her mind. If she just stepped an inch to the left, and shifted her right foot slightly forward, she would be able to tell _exactly_ how Sherlock felt about the entire situation. 

Except that quickly became unnecessary. 

Sherlock bent suddenly forward, pushing until his mouth was just past and south of her ear, almost to the juncture of her neck and jaw, and _groaned_. “Why are you constantly doing this?”

“Doing what? Hiding in gardens?” Joan tried desperately to ignore the way that every bit of them that could fit so perfectly had aligned with his shift forward. 

“Going out. Leaving.” Every word brushed against her neck with warm breath. Just beyond the fence, their target prowled and hunted, but hidden in the vines of a unfortunate garden, Joan closed her eyes and let herself suck in a sharp, abbreviated gasp at the way Sherlock’s breath brushed past the thudding pulse in her neck. 

Almost as soon as the push of air had exited her mouth, Sherlock spun her deftly in his grasp, far more smoothly than a man who claimed to have no intimate experience should be able, so that her face was within a whisper’s distance to his, his front pressed along hers. “I’m not going away, Sherlock,” she whispered, again so quietly that it was if she hadn’t spoken, but Sherlock tracked every movement of her lips. “I’m… I’m not _leaving_.” She tried to move back, move away from the insistent press of hips on hers. “I’m just trying to…”

“What?” He moved even closer, though she could not have thought it possible. Something hard, hot pressed into her stomach, and Joan wanted to press her hands against his chest and shove but shifted closer instead, hating herself for wanting to prolong it just a second more. “Why are you always _going_?”

“I’m not _going_ anywhere, Sherlock, I am just trying not to… not to…” She finally looked him full in the face, only to find his eyes tracing the angry twists of her lips, and it was suddenly so much, so terribly much, and so terribly not enough. 

She sucked in a sharp inhale and pressed her lips to his. 

Joan assumed Sherlock would freeze, push her away, call her an idiot. She assumed it would last five seconds before the entire mass of her useless sentiment was thrown back in her face.

This completely explained how stunned she was when Sherlock released a little grunt of disbelief and wrapped his hand around the back of her neck to pull her further into the kiss. His lips parted just enough for her probing tongue to push forward; at the touch of his tongue to hers, she felt her traitorous left leg wobble slightly, but there was no chance of falling while Sherlock tucked his arm around her waist, anchoring her against his mouth. 

Suddenly the long skirt she’d worn no longer felt ridiculously too young, but rather brilliant as Sherlock tugged until he’d dragged the front of it over his wrist until it was bunched just at her waist. The access to the practical but rather flimsy cut of her knickers was not wasted: Sherlock pulled aside the thin fabric to trace a (shaking) finger just against her and god-fucking-damn, who knew that she could keen so sharply, or that Sherlock could muffle her so well against his shoulder? 

Time became a non-issue, in that there was not nearly enough of it to allow them time to hesitate. Joan brought her hands from where they had dug into Sherlock’s upper arms to his overly-posh belt, tugging at the link that wasn't quite a belt but wasn't quite a puzzle, despite how she felt at the moment. She huffed in frustration until Sherlock brought down a hand to easily flick open the ridiculous clasp, only to move directly back to her lower back as his other hand pulled again at the fabric of her knickers. Joan huffed again, reached under the bunch of fabric that Sherlock had gathered to wrap three fingers under the lace edging, pulling the whole thing down as quickly as possible, until she could wiggle it past her knees to her ankles and kick it away.

Sherlock curled his fingers forward, catching the warmth of her lips, groaning as she panted into their kiss. Joan tucked her hips forward, drawing him closer even as the angle caused her back to cramp. Seeming to catch the edge of pain to her breathing, Sherlock turned them around until her back was at the wall, pushing hard until she felt the edges of rough brick press into her back. Just as she thought to protest, he dropped both arms from her neck and skirt to push at her thighs until she found herself lifting off the ground. Instinctively, she wrapped her legs around his waist, which brought the evidence of his interest in the proceedings flush against the freshly re-skirted and throbbing hollow between her legs.

Suddenly, Joan couldn't even gather a hint of dignity around herself; she braced her body against the brick with her hips and right hand, while her left hand scrabbled at the bunched fabric of her skirt. Dragging it upwards, she pivoted towards Sherlock, relishing the press of his erection against her until she finally had pulled the skirt sufficiently high enough to readmit him. 

“Joan, please, Joan, I can’t,” he panted against her neck, rolling his hips forward until the insistent press of his hardness against her was unignorable. She threw her arms around his neck, sucking at his bottom lip as she swallowed his pleas.

“Yes, yes, please, yes, Sherlock,” she urged, and it seemed to spur him on, because suddenly he was snaking a hand between them to grab himself, to guide himself to her, where she was wet and desperate. When he first breached, she cut off a plea with splutter, one hand still around his neck, the other pushing against the brick wall as a both a support and a brace as he slid home. It was overwhelming and overdue, and Joan could barely breathe around the desperate gasping of her lungs as Sherlock rolled his hips again, but this time buried in her as if he’d always belonged. 

There was no finesse in their movements -- her tumble over the fence earlier had been more graceful than the movements they made now, but Sherlock found a way to hold her against the wall while still pushing two fingers into Joan’s mouth long enough for her to lave them with her tongue. After barely a moment, he pulled them free and brought them to just above where they were joined. Unerringly, (and how annoying was it that he couldn't remember the sun’s importance in the sky but found the time to memorize female anatomy?) he pressed where she wanted him the most, thrusting into her with deep, concentrated movements.

At the first touch of his fingers to her, she had to stifle her own cry with a hand, causing her body to shift a further downward onto him as she lost a bit of the bracing against the wall. It caused Sherlock to bury himself even deeper, and he lost his own sudden yelp into the joint of her shoulder and neck, choosing to translate it into a sharp bite to the skin there, where it was sure to show. His fingers worked neat, tight circles even while he moved, and what little of Joan’s mind that hadn’t completely melted appreciated his multitasking extensively. 

What had melted, though, made her meet every thrust with as much as she could, pinned halfway up a brick wall four blocks from home, ignoring the little bruises and cuts the clay dug into her back. Joan realized she was panting Sherlock’s name into his ear, realized that every one of her intonations was edged in desperation, because this was exactly what Joan had been trying to avoid with her professors and Americans and baristas. 

Sherlock shoved forward decisively, while curling his fingers with a violinist’s precision, and Joan threw her head back and accepted his mouth against hers to smother her moan. After a moment, even as she continued to shiver against Sherlock, she realized he had pushed as far into her as he could and held still, and she tucked a hand against his jaw to draw out his anguished cry so that she could swallow it. 

She felt him pulse in her, making shallow desperate thrusts that melted into stillness. She could actually feel reality seep back into him. He suddenly pulled away from their kiss, holding her firmer against the wall as if he didn’t quite understand how she had gotten there. 

After a moment, he slipped free, leaving her just slightly aching. She felt panic dragging at the edges of her sanity, a feeling she hadn’t experienced since she had moved in with Sherlock. Joan could barely look at him, terrified that he would be shortly condemning what they had done, implying that she had done it just because she had cut her date short. 

Implying that now that the fervor was over, she would write it off as any other tryst she had ever had. 

Sherlock tucked his face into the crook of her neck, right where his teeth had gripped just a moment ago, and she waited for the excuses, which meant it took her a moment to translate the whispers into the goosebumps he had raised.

“I’m so sorry, Joan, I’m sorry, please, I’m sorry,” and there was a horrific thickness to his begging that made Joan let her skirt fall straight again, freeing her hands to wrap around him and fit him close against her again, this time as close to chaste as they had always been.

“Sherlock, no, stop, stop.” His begging drew to a silence, which Joan took advantage of to do some begging of her own. “Please don’t tell me you regret it, please. I can’t-” she heard her own voice break, a sound she hadn’t heard since surrounded in blood soaked sand. “I can’t hear that, please don’t tell me that.”

When Sherlock still stayed silent, mouth against her collarbone, she felt herself grapple with his coat, digging her fingers into his back. “Sherlock, _please_ , I’m sorry, I should have -- I wanted to, I wanted so badly, you have to know that. You have to have seen--”

“Seen what?”

“Fuck you, you wanker, you know exactly what. Seen me, seen me and you.”

“You said,” Sherlock finally straightened, ignorant of the vine leaf that brushed against his forehead as he leaned towards Joan. “You said that you don’t date friends. Or flatmates.”

“I don’t. I don’t, I never do, but god, Sherlock,” said Joan, cupping his face with her hands and looking directly into the questionable blue of his eyes. “You’re not just a flatmate or a friend. You have to know that. You _have_ to have seen that.”

“How can I see something like that?”

“How can you not _observe_ something like that?” She gathered her courage enough to lean forward to meld their lips together. It was almost impossible to not lose herself in how enthusiastically Sherlock responded. Her back became reaquainted with the brick wall very suddenly, and she longed for the smooth, if loud, wallpaper of Baker Street. 

“Take me home, Sherlock,” she whispered into his parted lips, and he drew back just far enough that his thumb was no longer at the hollow of her neck but free to press against her cheek as he stared into her eyes, blue flickering in front of blue, eventually nodding with more and more enthusiasm.

“Let me take you home,” he said, dipping once again to close the distance. 

As they pulled themselves over the fence, this time with Sherlock’s hand clutched tightly around Joan’s, Joan thought to ask, “What about the suspect?”

Very sharply, Sherlock spun her as soon as her heels (which Joan now appreciated since they made it that much easier to meet Sherlock’s lips) came even with the sidewalk, and said into the resultant, ecstatic kiss, “Who cares?”

It was as good as an I love you. Joan could wait for the real thing.


	2. Chapter 2

In hindsight, perhaps ‘I love you’ would’ve been better as a softener for blows to come.

In an additional hindsight, she should have grabbed her knickers before leaving the garden.

In even more, far more aggravating hindsight, the fact that they always went for Joan first still made her hackles rise in indignation. Alright, yes, she’s a woman, and seeing beyond that can be rather difficult for criminal morons working on about seven functioning brain cells, but she’s an army-trained veteran who has taken a bullet and has extensive experience in hand to hand combat. Why is it no one remembers _that_?

Regardless, Joan was definitely knicker-less, kiss-bruised, and post-coital shivery when she was tackled very hard from behind by none other than Stark, who was wielding his cleaver but enjoying his wiry strength as a weapon even more, obviously having waited for them to emerge from their hiding spot. Her hand was torn out of Sherlock’s before she hit the ground, unable to do much more than use her left hand to attempt to break her fall. Her left shoulder took the brunt of the impact, which caused her to hit her chin anyway, howling in pain as she twisted away from Stark’s considerable mass.

Someone let out a furious yell, though it was hard to tell if it is Sherlock or Stark, the latter of which had just received a rather decisive elbow to the chin. As Joan flipped onto her stomach, realizing her skirt had rode up dangerously high in the wake of the tackle, she saw out of the corner of her eye Sherlock’s launch at Stark, who had begun to attempt to reach Joan again. It was a good launch, Joan thought, even as she started to haul herself back to her feet. It was surprisingly difficult to ignore the stinging pain in her chin and mouth; a quick tongue to her right central incisor confirmed a chipped tooth. 

Oh, well. Maybe Mycroft knew a good dentist. 

Stark had managed to roll Sherlock onto his back to land at least one good hit. Joan decided it was the night for inappropriate jumping on people without their prior approval, and jumped onto Stark’s back, causing him to roll off Sherlock. With a complicated, slightly painful twisting of her torso, she managed to be straddling him, pinning his wrists to either side of his body. 

It was only once the red had begun to ebb from the peripherals of her vision that she noted the intense pain in the center of her face that hadn’t been there before her wrestling match with London’s most persistent moron. He had apparently managed to hit her at one point, which was impressive, if embarrassing. Blood was dripping out her nose to slip down her philtrum. She licked at it before shouting to Sherlock, “Get the cleaver!”

“You’re bleeding!” he growled.

“Oh, my god, get the fucking cleaver out of reach. Christ, Sherlock.” She couldn't wipe at the blood off her face without letting go of Stark, so she just let it puddle in the tight press of her lips. She glared down at Stark with unreasonable hatred. “You absolute fucker,” she hissed, picking up his wrists to slam them down mercilessly onto the ground as he struggled beneath her. Her grip with her thighs, combined with the press of her ankles against his calves, meant she just had to keep the pressure down while Sherlock gathered himself to get the cleaver.

A moment later, someone was tugging Stark’s hands out of her grasp to pull them above his head. Joan sat back panting as Sherlock zip-tied his wrists together, taking just a moment to swipe at her face, grimacing when her arm came away with a fair amount of blood. She had two very glorious black eyes and two weeks of painful sneezing to look forward to, undoubtedly. She used her bloodless hand to pull her mobile free and hit the speed dial for Greg. 

“Let me guess--”

“If it is something along the lines of, ‘Sherlock and I just beat up the prime suspect but only after he tried first,’ then yes, good guess.”

She could hear Greg collapse into his desk chair, and could picture him pinching the bridge of his nose. “Jesus, Joan.” He huffed a little. “I had dinner with Molly, you know.”

“Yeah, I know, she told me. All about it. Repeatedly.” Joan sniffled wetly, before wincing at the taste of blood at the back of her throat. She liked Molly, honestly, but she seemed so excited to tell Joan how “completely, absolutely over Sherlock” she was, as if Joan would be giddy with the information.

Though, looking back on the way Joan had smiled smugly in the morgue for the rest of the evening, maybe Molly had a point. Damn it. 

“Sorry, Greg,” she said, a little less snide, slightly distracted by the way Sherlock had wrapped his hands around her hips to pull her off the criminal below her. She was further distracted by the deft way that Sherlock used the zip tie as leverage to flip Stark onto his back, muttering about “timing” and “ruined.” Joan felt a pulse low in her stomach as she reached out a hand to grab one of his, clenching it tight. He turned to look at her, his head whip sharp, a high flush in his cheekbones. She grinned, incapable of stopping it, squeezing his hand. 

After a few moments of Greg mumbling in a rather hostile tone about consulting detectives and their suicidal, homicidal bloggers, he finally requested the address where they had pinned Stark, which allowed Joan to finally end the call (pretending not to hear his squawking protests at their actions) and begin to perfect her ‘Not Attempting to Fuck Sherlock With Her Eyes’ look, one she had thought she had mastered but found had become completely useless having _actually fucked Sherlock_ and oh, sweet god, she had fucked Sherlock in someone’s posh, poorly decorated garden, and there was a hot slickness between her thighs that had smeared...

She shifted where she was squatting next to Stark as Sherlock deftly finished pulling the zip-ties around his ankles taut, and after a few moments of debating the best way of crouching, she landed on kneeling with her skirt tucked demurely around her lower body, finally pinching the bridge of her nose to stem the trickling blood flow. She could taste it in her mouth, both via the part of her lips where it had pooled and the back of her throat as she swallowed. Sherlock scooted back from Stark, satisfied with his restraints. He finally looked at Joan, studying her face with familiar intensity, before reaching out to brush a drop of blood away from the underside of her nose. The gentle brush her his thumb against her skin, fingertips still faintly fragrant with their previous activities, was enough to cause Joan to break into a wide, blood stained smile. 

Sherlock slowly returned the grin. “Alright?” asked Joan. 

“Satisfactory, even if you did let him hit you.”

“I didn't let him hit me.”

“He _did_ hit you.”

“I didn't ask him to.” She snorted a bit on the end, coating the back of her throat with swallowed blood again, much to her displeasure. 

“You look fantastic.”

“Oh, fuck off.” But Sherlock kept grinning at Joan, and she didn't even mind the two swallows of blood-heavy saliva that resulted from continuing to smile back at him. 

She moved away from Stark as gracefully as possible, sitting next to Sherlock on the kerb so that they sat side to side, shoulders brushing. As soon as she had settled, Sherlock reached for her hand again, tucking it away from Stark’s view has he texted rapidly with his free hand. Joan looked down at their tangled fingers, her wrist, his knuckles splashed with blood. 

For eighteen months, Joan had scowled at, groaned over, ignored, and denied every single comment by strangers about her and Sherlock. The tabloids had loved them -- they speculated endlessly about their relationships, called her for and then immediately ignored her comments, and had implied, multiple times, that she and Sherlock were humping like rabbits all over London. 

Sherlock had never said a thing, opting for silence wrapped in disdainful dismissal, which was why Joan kept denying the whole bloody thing. It wasn’t even that Sherlock had ever seemed offended by the whole thing -- he just appeared bored with all of it. None of it had even justified an offhand dismissal, it appeared, which was a bigger blow to her than any other unromantic gesture in her life. She had wrapped herself tightly in a cloak of “We’re Just Friends!” while making it her personal mission to pursue whomever seemed halfway willing. 

Now, however, Sherlock texted rapidly on his phone but never let his grip pull from Joan, and she thought of how she had sat in her chair at Baker Street for hours on end those two years, staring at his empty seat, while the tremors in her left hand ebbed and flowed. Suddenly, all her stupid, inane little reactions to their suspected relationship had seemed insulting. Suddenly, she had wanted nothing more than for someone to ask her “Were you desperately in love?” and be able to answer, “Yes, both of us.”

It had taken her almost a year and a half before she willingly looked at another man. 

Mark had seemed… wonderful. A wonderful boyfriend, a wonderful fiance, wonderfully patient when Sherlock burst back into her life in an avalanche of excitement, anger, and fear. He never seemed to be jealous of her time with Sherlock; he waved her off when she begged off dinner to chase a serial killer, let Sherlock help her choose the seating arrangements for their wedding, even clasped her hand tightly with tears in his eyes when Sherlock told everyone they knew that he loved her as much as Mark. 

But then that all ended so wonderfully. She snorted again, just to herself, then remembered the blood. Damn it. 

She looked down at their fingers again, then up to Sherlock’s face. He’d stopped texting now, opting to watch her instead. The euphoric grin he’d worn before had faded now to a sort of worried twitch at the corners of his lips. Her own smile wavered a bit. This was it.

“We need to-”

“Don’t.” Sherlock released her hand with a very sudden movement, putting cold distance between them. He stood rapidly, the edges of his coat brushing her cheek as she felt him withdraw from her, from them, from it. “Just… don’t.”

In the distance, sirens rang. 

+---+

It just so happened, or perhaps Greg knew it and felt slightly spiteful at Joan’s quick dismissal, that Dimmock was close enough to the scene that the case was being transferred to him. He'd never really forgiven Sherlock’s advice regarding submission or Joan’s unequivocal rejection of his invite to drinks, which meant that neither of them had the slightest chance of feigning exhaustion or injury to get out of giving statements. Stark was deposited in Dimmock’s car, Sherlock in Sally’s, and Joan, despite her strongly worded protests, was plopped directly into an ambulance to be looked over.

Sherlock hadn't looked at her once.

They used antiseptic wipes to clear away the blood from her face, leaving her to wonder if there was something genuinely wrong about that fact that she preferred the taste of blood on her lips over benzalkonium chloride. After assessing that she would (as predicted) wear spectacular bruises under her eyes and that beyond the chipped tooth, no further damage was done, she was brought by some uniform to Scotland Yard a full hour after Sherlock had left.

The giving of her statement was as tedious as ever, but with the added stress of attempting to explain how long she and Sherlock had hidden in the garden before leaving, and how they could have been caught so off-guard. 

“And then Stark hit you?”

“Yes, while I was trying to subdue him.”

“Did he bite you?”

Joan blanched, drawing back sharply in her chair. “Pardon?”

Dimmock gestured at her with his pen, his bitter-tinged smirk barely concealed. “Your neck. Did Stark bite you?” John reflexively, unerringly brought her fingertips to the no doubt bruise-bright mark Sherlock had left on the slope where her neck became her shoulder. She threw Dimmock a scowl.

“No, Stark didn’t give me a hickey, you idiot.” She refused to blush or otherwise appear disconcerted. Even if it wasn't Sherlock’s teeth marks in her skin, she had nothing to be ashamed of by wearing the marks of a successful sexual encounter. It did cause her stomach to become heavy with dread, though, for an entirely different reason. Sherlock was undoubtedly back at Baker Street, having obviously given a statement free of questions regarding any kiss-induced bruises. She could picture him lying prone on the sofa, long fingertips (had he washed his hands or did they still smell faintly of her and him and awful gardens?) steepled beneath his chin. 

She imagined him turning the whole thing over in his head, debating, deciding, settling on pretending the entire thing had never happened. 

“So that’s from--”

“I had a date earlier in the evening,” she said, telling the truth, even if it had nothing to do with the mark on her neck. Dimmock raised an eyebrow as he wrote it down on his notebook. Joan glared at his ducked head and took unreasonable satisfaction in the evidence of his oncoming premature baldness. 

After a few moments of Dimmock carefully scratching out that Joan had a hickey, he continued asking her about the entire encounter, allowing her to slip back into rote recitation of everything that had happened after she’d pinned Stark, obviously without all the sentimental hand holding or blood stained grins. She skipped entirely over the part where Sherlock had wrenched his hand from hers to wander the scene in obvious agitation. 

It was interminable, offensive, and prying -- all of his questions seemed to be tinged with an incredulous edge, as if the idea of Joan pinning a man to the ground was ridiculous, as if the idea of Joan receiving a hickey was insane, as if the idea of Joan wanting to punch him in the nose was… Well, Dimmock didn’t quite seem to catch that urge, but it was there all the same. 

It was only towards the end, when Dimmock seemed to start to flag with exhaustion, heralding Joan’s release, and wanted to know the address of the garden that they had hidden to pass along to the forensics team to build the court case, that Jane remembered two important things:

What the hell was she going to say when she got back to 221B?

And where the fuck were her knickers?


End file.
